The Treasure Hunt game for the iOS is a unique underwater scuba diving experience.
Players manage all the realistic issues of scuba diving, from limited air to dangers including sharks!
The compelling visual impact of this game is astounding.

iPhone screen capture

As part of a very small development team, Markus modelled and textured all the environment art, including wrecks, plants, fish, treasure...all of it.
The nature of the game made it necessary to place hundreds of objects including gems, coins and ancient treasure on the sea floor.
Each location also needed plants - hundreds of them. Markus placed all these items using particles, physics and mel scripts.

iPhone screen capture

There are multiple locations to dive on, including the wrecks of pleasure craft and even a submerged helicopter! Throughout the world, sunken treasure can be found, from coins and gems to ancient weapons and modern flotsam.

Baked AO unlit render

The game engine was a custom marvel, speaking to the iOS hardware directly to achieve effects including caustics,
image based lighting, dirt maps and more.

Dinner... you!

Getting tanked

"I don't think there is an off-the-shelf engine that can do what David pulled off with this game!" MT

Tech Notes

Plants, including eel grass and others cover the sea floor in all locations.
Markus placed these by first painting particles over a 2D map in areas where plants should grow. Then, gravity was used to drop the particles onto the 3D terrain model, using more physics to have them slide off rocks and wrecks.
Markus wrote scripts to sample all the particle positions and replace them with instances of the plants.
Each instance was given a slight variation in orientation and scale with the result that no two plants appear identical yet few source models were required.

Gems and coins were handled similarily to plants. In this case however the game designer wanted more input as to their placement so Markus developed a method to read from a map marked up by the designer and convert those markings into various treasure items.